Aren't you Glad you Bailed Out These Poor Banks?

[william the wie]

The fact that Bear Stearns had a AAA rating the day before the collapse -- no f*cking way was that just incompetence.

It was a con job. Just like the 30 other ponzi like schemes upon which our whole economy rests.

I saw some startling stat the other day that said 3600 folks were indicted in the savings and loan scam of the 80's.

Today about 13 people have been indicted for the current and much larger crisis.

Fraud on a grand scale is business as usual. Nobody goes to jail anymore. They just get a bonus and a chance to be in the next presidential cabinet.

You've understated the problem. When Reagan nationalized Continental Illinois he set up a two tier financial legal system: one for the Too Big To Fail companies and another one for relatively small banks, S&Ls, insurance companies and pension funds. The people who almost collapsed the economy with their mismanagement of LTCM in 1998 are all gainfully employed still. I suspect that far more 3600 people from one lung mortgage brokerages, drive by appraisal agencies and so forth have been indicted at the state level but their interstate enablers took their golden parachutes and walked away clean.

 

[skeptic]

I think one of the Bush Bros walked away clean....

Neil Bush was a member of the board of directors of Denver-based Silverado Savings and Loan during the 1980s' larger Savings and Loan crisis. As his father, George H.W. Bush, was Vice President of the United States, his role in Silverado's failure was a focal point of publicity. According to a piece in Salon, Silverado's collapse cost taxpayers $1.3 billion.[2]

The US Office of Thrift Supervision investigated Silverado's failure and determined that Bush had engaged in numerous "breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest." Although Bush was not indicted on criminal charges, a civil action was brought against him and the other Silverado directors by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; it was eventually settled out of court, with Bush paying $50,000 as part of the settlement, as reported in the Style section of the Washington Post.[3]

A Republican fundraiser set up a fund to help defer costs Neil incurred in his S&L dealings.

yup

Neil Bush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I bought some aluminum last week and was a little startled to see the name Thyssen, as in Fritz Thyssen from ThyssenKrupp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on the letter head.

Apparently the guy who bankrolled Hitler with some help from another former Bush banker ( Prescott Bush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) is doing business in the USA after a merger to whitewash his name brand.

I don't think corruption is necessarily a new advent. But it is metastasizing.